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I used to find it fun to knock Jamie Kirchick around, but it eventually dawned on me that if I wanted to argue with an unreconstructed neoconservative, I should choose a more honest and skilled member of the species. His review of Matt's new book, Heads in the Sand, is a good example of why. The problem isn't that Jamie disagrees with the book. It's that he hasn't read it. Or possibly has read it and is lying about it. Or isn't smart enough to have understood it. But there's no way to argue with it, really, because it's not being honest about the content of the book. For instance, Jamie says:
Yglesias cites careerism as the sole motive for liberals’ support for the Iraq War. Democrats in Congress, he writes, supported the invasion because “it was useful from a careerist perspective,” in light of President Bush’s high approval ratings at the time. As for liberal commentators, they got in line behind Bush for the simple reason that “the writer’s life is more interesting and more important if the challenge of al-Qaeda is world-historical in scale.” He thus ignores the raft of Democratic politicians, liberal journalists, and Clinton-administration national security officials who, throughout the nineties and well into the administration of George W. Bush, believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction programs and unhesitatingly supported military action against him in 2003.The part Jamie is talking about begins -- in the galley copy we both have -- on page 60. "It's possible," Matt writes, "to group the genuine 'liberal hawks' into three broad, albeit somewhat overlapping families." The first family, according to Matt, "was a group of Democrats who favored invading Iraq for straightforward national security reasons...In [Kenneth] Pollack's view, as in Bush's, Saddam was likely to build a nuclear weapon in within a relatively short time frame. The problem with this was that once nuclear-armed, Saddam was likely to view himself as immune to U.S military retaliation and might recommence his efforts to conquer Kuwait...the book's argument struck many liberals, including myself, as extremely credible."The second family, according to Matt, were the "humanitarian militarists." This group believes, like Tom Friedman, that "what the Arab world desperately needs is a model that works -- a progressive Arab regime that by its sheer existence would create pressure and inspiration for gradual democratization and modernization around the region." Matt lays out the arguments of these two schools until page 72, when we get the third group, "political opportunists who wanted to project 'strength.'"Now recall what Kirchick said: "Yglesias cites careerism as the sole motive for liberals’ support for the Iraq War." Now Matt's my friend and his beliefs are close to mine, so one might expect that I'd defend its contents. And maybe, when the occasion arises, I will. But in this post, I want to make something clear: This isn't an argument Kirchick and I are having on the content of the book. I'm describing the content of the book. He's lying about it. There's just no earthly way to reconcile his account of Matt calling "careerism the sole motive" with Matt's book, which mentions careerism as the third of the three leading motives, and puts genuine national security concerns first. Hell, you can't even reconcile it with Matt, who supported the war on national security grounds. So if you want to take a really generous view of Kirchick's comments, you can say he hasn't read the book, and is assuming its contents. More likely, he's lying about its contents in order to create a straw man who's easier to knock down. But this is why it's not worth taking Jamie seriously. You just can't trust the kid.